With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
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An enchanted forest kingdom, a big dark swimming pool, out to sea
“Maybe you’re right, boss. It all depends on the way you look at it. . . . Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandad!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?” Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
“Maybe you’re right, boss. It all depends on the way you look at it. . . . Look, one day I had gone to a little village. An old grandfather of ninety was busy planting an almond tree. ‘What, grandad!’ I exclaimed. ‘Planting an almond tree?’ And he, bent as he was, turned round and said: ‘My son, I carry on as if I should never die.’ I replied: ‘And I carry on as if I was going to die any minute.’ Which of us was right, boss?”
Nikos Kazantzakis, Zorba the Greek
We are completely and wholly unique and in a very special one-on-one relationship with the divine. If I can recognize that in my life, there may still be things I want to do, changes I want to make, growth I want to achieve, but I can do so companioned by this spirit of playful and compassionate lovingness. If I can find ways of extending that to others as God has offered it to me, then I’ve found a real gift.
Instead of attempting to bless the Earth, I find that the Earth is calling divinity out of me. It becomes a reciprocal relationship. The more I can recognize the presence of the Beloved, of the Divine, acting within matter, the more matter begins to recognize that presence acting in me.
He was the only friend I had who would dive on the hood of a car. What does that mean? Look around you and you will see it meant a lot.
I. Writers may write in clear English, without needlessly opaque, spectacular and nonlinear associations. Code obfuscates; poetic code obfuscates utterly.
Such primal taciturnity, thought Rex of the rock, and after all it’s heard — the roar of the victor, the bleat of the victim, and all the echoes thereof ten thousand times over. Surely, I’ve fallen in with good company. Surely, a revelation is in the offing.
“The Gabriel Books” are a series of small cartoon books.